It’s often not easy to be a romance author, and the time around Valentine’s Day can be especially trying. A whole day (or week) focused on love and romance brings out all types of naysayers for the romance genre.

Every year, Dahlia Adler lists prompts on Instagram for writers to share about themselves, their work, and their life. I’ve been tempted to see what made the platform so popular, so this event was a good opportunity.

Aspiration is “a hope or ambition of achieving something,” such as we see with the #RelationshipGoals tags on social media. Not surprisingly, our hopes and goals are sometimes reflected in the stories we write or the books we read.

Plotters might find any kind of pantsing hard to understand, but even pantsers can struggle with pantsing our characters’ development, as that process comes with a different set of problems from developing our plots.

Last week, we talked about discovering the essence of our character, but what about the essence of our story. What makes a story idea the one we want to tell? And why does understanding our story’s essence matter?

I’ve been helping Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi at Writers Helping Writers keep a big secret: The Emotion Thesaurus Second Edition! Angela and Becca have added new responses, new entries, and new writing tips.